Tag: Life

I’m having a bit of a reorganisation of my social media. My pages are a bit jumbled up and sometimes a bit confusing. If I’m going to try and make a living as an artist I need to try and organise things.

Hopefully this will all be done with the help of a friend. He’s called Mike and he runs a creative art business.

Basically I’ve got a few pages spread around the Internet but they are all slightly different, so when you look for me on Facebook I have 3 or 4 different pages but I only have one page on Instagram but I post anything and everything there.

I’m going to try using the “my story” section on Instagram and manage it so people will see pages like “inspirations” or “wip” (for work in progress) to Clutter things up less. The idea is to be more interconnected and be able to share more in a coherent way.

Our government just lost a vote by a massive margin. Our Prime Minister has failed to get her argument accepted and the country does not know what is going to happen.the vote was 202 for her and 432 against her. There must be a chance we can ditch it and start trying to improve the situation. I think we have got to realise how patronising other countries must think we are. We seem to think everything is about us. Shouting loudly at foreigners and treating people who want to come here with contempt.

Not everyone feels like that. Some of us want to embrace Europe and the rest of the world as part of the human family.

I just hope we can get the mess sorted out. We need to care more about people and less about money and greed.

These are some of the illustrations I did for my thesis on pre Christian celtic art from the fifteenth century BC to the first AD.

Sorry they are not beautifully photographed but it’s 3.30am and I was excited because I found it and it’s the first time I’ve seen it for about 38 years!

I see now where I get my love of patterns from and that I could do some of these drawings now. I don’t know where I started with some of them…. Oh the confidence of youth.

There are photographs in the thesis but I haven’t included them as they were taken by a friend. They are starting to fade but surprisingly the pen and ink drawings I did seem to have stayed stable. Probably because it’s been stored in a drawer…

I just watched a programme called “the sky at night” a BBC programme about the Nasa New Horizons mission that flew past a tiny planetoid called Ultima Thule (pronounced Thooley) on 1st January 2019. This was the same probe that sent back beautiful photos of Pluto a couple of years ago. Ultima Thule is only 21 miles long and the probe showed that it is made up of two lumpy spheres of material stuck together at a neck. There is only one clearish photo so far but they also know that it probably is a red colour. The pictures they published have been brightened to show details but the thing is probably a dark red colour.

The probe was apparently travelling at around 15 kilometres a second so it sped past Ultima Thule and is now several hundred kilometres past it and travelling further into the Kuiper belt (a ring of debris spread in a flat layer around the outer edge of the solar system). New horizons is nuclear fueled because solar panels would not work in the darkness so far from the sun.

It will take two years to stream all the data thay have collected from the probe back to Earth. This is the furthest world we have ever seen close up.

I love informative programmes like the Sky at Night. Its been on TV since the 1960’s I think. I have learnt a lot about astronomy over the years from it.

One thing I do notice is street names. There is a Christine Street in Stoke-on-Trent and other names that are part of my family.

But one thing I have seen is where names have changed. For instance this name was changed to Spark Street. But what was it before?

It starts with P, but that’s all you can see… As I’m an incomer I don’t have a memory of it changing. I suppose I would have to look at old maps. If I do I think I will find a few more changes. I’m guessing it might be from when the six towns became a federation and turned into the city of Stoke-on-Trent. The towns are Stoke-upon-Trent, Burslem, Hanley, Tunstall, Longton and Fenton. Also known as “The Potteries”.